Legitimacy adds positive value to political authority and obligation. Discuss. (2024, 20 Marks)
H. L. A. Hart (The Concept of Law, 1961) distinguished being obliged to hand money to a gunman from having an obligation, such as a citizen’s duty to pay tax. What separates the two is legitimacy. It adds two things: to authority, a right to rule as well as the ability to compel; to obligation, a moral reason to obey as well as a prudential one. The value is real, but it is conditional.
Value Added to Authority
- Power becomes authority. Max Weber‘s traditional, charismatic and legal-rational grounds are grounds of belief that make command acceptable. Compliance is then offered as a duty, not extracted as a cost.
- Economy and stability. Coercion is expensive and generates resistance. Hannah Arendt noted that where force has to be used, authority has already failed.
- Loss shows the value. In 1789 the French monarchy still had a large army, but belief in its right to rule collapsed first, and soldiers such as the Gardes Françaises then joined the crowd.
Value Added to Obligation
Theories of political obligation are, in effect, accounts of how legitimacy turns into duty:
- Consent. John Locke grounded duty in express or tacit consent. David Hume‘s reply was that staying put is no more consent than the presence on board ship of a man carried there asleep.
- Fair play. For Hart (1955) and John Rawls (1964), those who accept the benefits of a cooperative scheme owe their share of its burdens. This is the moral basis of tax compliance.
- Gratitude. In Plato‘s Crito, Socrates owes the laws of Athens what a child owes its parents, and so refuses to escape his sentence.
- Natural duty. In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls holds that we have a duty to support and comply with just institutions, whether or not we have consented to them.
- Common good. T. H. Green (Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, 1879–80, publ. 1886): “will, not force, is the basis of the State.” We owe obedience because the state secures the conditions for moral self-realisation.
Qualifications
- Legitimacy can be borrowed. On Antonio Gramsci‘s account of hegemony, belief in rightful rule can be produced to serve particular interests. Its “positive value” is then partly counterfeit.
- Philosophical anarchism. Robert Paul Wolff (In Defense of Anarchism, 1970) argued that moral autonomy rules out any duty to obey simply because a command has been issued. A. John Simmons (Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 1979) found that no theory grounds a general obligation. A state may be justified without every subject being bound to it.
- Obligation is conditional. Henry David Thoreau‘s Civil Disobedience (1849) put conscience above law. Rawls defined civil disobedience as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law”. Because the dissenter accepts the penalty, it affirms the legitimacy of the order even while breaking one of its laws.
The Indian Illustration
M. K. Gandhi‘s satyagraha, from Non-Cooperation (1920) to the Salt March (1930), withdrew obligation from a Raj whose laws were valid but whose right to rule was denied. On 25 November 1949 B. R. Ambedkar warned that once constitutional remedies exist, civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha are “the Grammar of Anarchy.” The same act is duty against an illegitimate order and anarchy against a legitimate one, which shows that legitimacy decides what obligation requires.
Conclusion
Legitimacy adds positive value: it turns might into right and compliance into duty. But the value depends on being justifiable. It also carries a right of refusal, and a legitimacy that forbids refusal has already lost part of its value.